-Business Standard While allocations to several social sector schemes have been increased, concerns about the direction of the funds being ploughed remain The health and education sectors have trudged along the last two years awaiting direction that would be set through new policies the National Democratic Alliance government promised. In the absence of these guiding documents, most observers have been left to read the intermittent policy decisions like tea-leaves to guess the...

-The Indian Express The budget recognises the crisis in rural India, but allocations do not match the talk In India now, there appears to be an inverse relationship between the time finance ministers spend talking about a particular issue in their budget speeches and the amount of money they actually allocate to deal with it. This was true of former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s budget speeches, but incumbent FM Arun Jaitley...

In the age of social media, various sections of the Indian polity and civil society have reacted publicly in diverse voices, following the presentation of the Union Budget 2016-17 by Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley. An assessment of the Union Budget 2016-17 has been done in the following paragraphs by the Inclusive Media for Change team, based on a number of media reports, Government documents (including the Budget Documents), and reports...

-Down to Earth The country’s performance in terms of public participation and budget oversight by the legislature was rated “weak” in the survey As Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley gears up to present the Union Budget 2016-17 (April-March), it is worth noting that an international survey of budgets of over a 100 countries points out that India provides “limited” budget information in the public domain. The Open Budget Survey 2015, released by the...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...